Talk:John Foster (MP for Northwich)

Birth
Comparing the ODNB, Who's Who, and Foster's father's entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography points up something quite interesting -


 * ODNB - Foster, Sir John Galway (1903–1982), lawyer, was born in Paris on 21 February 1903, the only child (he also had a half-brother and two half-sisters) of Brigadier-General Hubert John Foster, Royal Engineers, military attaché at the British embassy in Washington, and a woman whose surname was Galway, an Irish Canadian. No birth certificate can be found.


 * [The original 1990 version of the article in the DNB is vaguer - Foster, Sir John Galway(1903/4–1982), lawyer, was the only child (he also had a half brother and two half sisters) of Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert John Foster, Royal Engineers, military attaché at the British embassy in Washington, and a lady whose surname was Galway, an Irish Canadian.]


 * Who's Who - Foster, Sir John (Galway) - KBE 1964 - Born 4 Nov. 1904; s of late General Hubert John Foster; died 1 Feb. 1982


 * ADB - He married Mary Agatha Gough, née Tobin, at the British consulate, Venice, Italy, on 16 January 1904. [...] He was survived by his wife and their son, (Sir) John Galway Foster, who later became a member of the British House of Commons.

My reading of these is that the chain of events went something like -


 * 1) JG Foster is born in Paris to Colonel Foster and Ms. Galway, February 1903
 * 2) Colonel Foster and Ms Gough marry in January 1904
 * 3) JG Foster, in later life, presents himself as born November 1904, a safe nine or ten months after his parents marriage.
 * 4) This is not completely unknown - whoever wrote the 1990 DNB article was aware of it - but pretty much everyone quotes the 1904 date

I am pretty confident the ODNB is accurate - it's the most recent source (revised 2004) and is the one I would tend to prefer over the others. I've updated the article accordingly. Andrew Gray (talk) 10:54, 29 December 2017 (UTC)